Last year I and Alberto Ferrari wrote a new edition of the Analysis Services Tabular book, which official title is Tabular Modeling in SQL Server Analysis Services (2nd Edition) . Some delay in editing and production delayed the printing, but the book Read More...

More than one year ago, I and Alberto Ferrari started to work on DirectQuery, exploring the new implementation appeared in Analysis Services 2016 for the Tabular models, which uses the same engine of Power BI. The previous version of DirectQuery appeared Read More...

If you work with Power Pivot, Power BI, or Analysis Services Tabular, you probably already know VertiPaq Analyzer. If you never used it, with the new release 1.7 you have another couple of very good reason to try it. VertiPaq Analyzer is a Power Pivot Read More...

Microsoft recently released the Service Pack 1 for SQL Server 2016. If you use Analysis Services, installing this update is a no-brainer and you should do that as soon as possible. The reason are all related to memory management. Microsoft officially Read More...

The 2015 has been an amazing year for Power BI. One year ago, I was commenting on this blog the public preview of Power BI dashboards. A few days ago, Microsoft released the December update of Power BI Desktop and several updates of the Power BI service. Read More...

After many years of helping several companies around the world creating small and large data models using SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular, I’ve seen a common performance issue that is underestimated at design time. The VertiPaq engine in SSAS Tabular Read More...

During the writing of The Definitive Guide to DAX I wanted a simple way to analyze the content and distribution of data compressed in the VertiPaq engine, used by Analysis Services Tabular, Power Pivot and Power BI models. I always relied on BISM Memory Read More...

Alberto Ferrari wrote an interesting article about DIVIDE performance in DAX. This new function has been introduced in SQL Server Analysis Services 2012 SP1, so it is available also in Excel 2013 (which still doesn’t have other features/fixes introduced Read More...

A few days ago I published a new article on DAX Patterns web site describing how to implement Basket Analysis in DAX. This topic is a very classical one and is also covered in the many-to-many revolution white paper. It has been also discussed in several Read More...

A few days ago I published the article FILTER vs CALCULATETABLE: optimization using cardinality estimation , where I try to explain why the sentence “CALCULATETABLE is better than FILTER” is not always true. In reality, CALCULATETABLE internally might Read More...

You can use the USERELATIONSHIP function in DAX to apply a non-active relationship in a particular DAX calculation. This approach is usually simple in a measure (just use USERELATIOSHIP in one of the filter arguments of CALCULATE) but as soon as you try Read More...

Alberto Ferrari recently recorded a free short video introduction about what is time intelligence . When you have to perform time-related calculations in Power Pivot or in Analysis Services Tabular, you have to rely on some DAX expressions. There are Read More...

In the last weeks the Microsoft BI buzzword has been Power BI for Office 365, which will be available soon in preview. I read a few comments about the fact that there is a constant discussion about the future but a lack of information and discussion about Read More...

I received this request in many courses , messages and also forum discussions: having an Analysis Services Tabular model, it would be nice being able to extract a correspondent PowerPivot data model. In order of priority, here are the specific feature Read More...

If you think PowerPivot and Tabular are good tools but sometime the design tools are not fast/complete/flexible enough, please consider voting this suggestion on Connect to request a textual representation Tabular or PowerPivot Data Models . This is the Read More...